Project Overview

Mashape is a San Francisco startup focused on providing an array of subscription-based and open-source tools for developers. I was asked to provide ongoing frontend development for Gelato, as well as architect a LESS-based frontend development system.

Services Provided

Frontend Templates for Gelato.io

After getting my local development environment set up, I began to work on tight deadline to provide HTML and LESS for new and updated application views. As I worked with the existing codebase, I also made continual improvements, often simplifying markup (and providing richer semantics) as well as abstracting to remove redundant styles.

Gelato – Add API view (built in HTML / LESS)

Themable Developer Portals

Gelato is a tool to help development teams publish beautiful, up-to-date documentation for their software. As part of the product, developers can customize colors and graphics to theme their documentation portal to match their brand’s palette and personality. It was a special challenge to develop templates that allowed for controlled flexibility within each theme.

Sample developer portal landing page theme (built in HTML / LESS)

Sample developer portal landing page theme (built in HTML / LESS)

Flexbox: Cutting Edge CSS Layout

Mashape’s customers are highly technical individuals, and typically visit with the very latest browser, so we were able to build new features using flexbox for layout. This meant that adjusting and adding layouts was effortless – even those that would be time-consuming and tricky using traditional float-based layout methods.

In order to provide the best browser support and the cleanest codebase, I created mixins to add vendor prefixes to the flexbox properties. The result was a well-supported, modern layout system that was easy to understand and extend.

Component-based Frontend Development

In order to maintain the ever-growing library of interface components within the Mashape ecosystem, the team decided to build a new component library starting with the smallest UI elements and build up. This structure allows any component to be moved without affecting it’s appearance or behavior. To take it one step further, individual media queries were written within each component, so even responsive behavior would be isolated to one specific block of CSS.

Frontend Development for Applications

I thrive when working with other designers and developers to design frontend systems that are flexible and maintainable. If you have an application or interface you think would benefit from a hybrid designer / developer such as myself, please don’t hesitate to contact me.